How to Explain Vacant Property Work: A Plain Language Guide

If you’ve spent any part of your career working in community revitalization, you know it can be challenging to explain what you do. Most people outside of the field don’t know what a land bank is, have a negative view of “blight,” or tune out when they hear “delinquent property tax enforcement.”

This work is complex because the processes for putting a vacant, abandoned, deteriorated property back to productive use are complex. (If it were easy, we wouldn’t be here.)

However, clearly explaining systemic vacancy and the tools that address it is essential to advancing our work. It helps you build support for what you do, attract funding for neighborhood revitalization, and foster trust with people in your community.

This guide offers some tips, thought-provoking questions, and examples to help you talk about your work so that anyone can understand and see the value in it.

Consider your audience.

Start by thinking about who you’re talking to and where you’re talking to them. What’s your context? Are you at a reception with professionals from other sectors? Speaking to a potential donor? Doing an interview on a general-interest podcast? Chatting with a senior citizen at the community block party? Each context requires a different approach. The amount of detail you go into and examples you share should change depending on who the conversation is with.

Put vacancy into a relatable context.

Everyone has seen a run-down property—even if they don’t live in a community that has experienced decades of disinvestment. Maybe they pass a boarded-up business on their commute. Or they’ve watched one of the many horror movies set in an abandoned building. Perhaps they’re a fan of HGTV’s house-flipping shows.

For many, vacant properties are a kind of background noise—just another part of their community landscape or fictional set-dressing. The more civically minded may complain to city leaders: “Someone should do something about that eyesore!” But most never stop to wonder what made a property vacant, or why it’s stayed that way.

Before jumping into technical solutions, your job is to make people see these places they’ve long overlooked—not with fear, but with curiosity. Try asking questions like:

• Have you ever noticed the vacant lots in your neighborhood? What do you think used to be there, and why is it gone now?
• Do you know why it’s so hard to do something about that abandoned house?
• Have you thought about how living next door to a vacant property might affect someone’s daily life?

Avoid jargon. Using plain language is not “dumbing it down.”

The nonprofit and government sectors are notorious for lingo and acronyms. However, terms that are familiar to us, like “VAD” (i.e., vacant, abandoned, and deteriorated), “systemic vacancy,” and “code liens,” confuse most people. Rather than spending your time defining insider vocabulary, just use simple, direct terms.

For example:

• Instead of saying, “We’re addressing VAD properties through strategic code enforcement,” try: “We’re holding owners of run-down properties accountable by making sure they fix things that could harm neighbors.”

Plain language can also help you share the commonsense reasons why solving vacancy is so hard. For example:

• In America, property rights are strongly protected. Even if someone walks away from their house, it still belongs to them. Getting an abandoned house into the hands of a new, responsible owner can be a long and expensive legal process for local governments.
• It’s sometimes unclear who has the legal right to a long-vacant piece of land. It can take years to find the owner and get them to do something about it.

Use clear examples and stories to illustrate the challenges.

It’s tempting for someone to respond, “Why don’t they just fix it up!” But the HGTV fantasy of renovating a dilapidated home, peddled on shows like Good Bones and Flip or Flop, rarely matches reality in neighborhoods where it costs more to fix a house than most houses in that neighborhood are worth.

You can illustrate the challenge quickly with a hypothetical (but very realistic) example like this:

• Imagine buying an abandoned house for $1,000 in a neighborhood where there are a lot of vacant properties. On top of paying off any unpaid property taxes, there are repair costs: a new roof, pest fumigation, new HVAC and electrical, and removing lead pipes, mold, and asbestos. Then the basics: kitchen, bathrooms, floors, and drywall…and suddenly you’ve spent $200,000 just to get the house back to livable condition. But the home is worth only $60,000 based on sales of similar, good-condition homes in the neighborhood. You’re underwater before you’ve even moved in. This is why some owners walk away, and why potential new residents are put off.

Stories like this are powerful illustrations of the gap between perception and reality, demonstrating that “just fixing up” a vacant property isn’t as simple as it sounds.

Focus on the people.

Many associate vacant, abandoned, and deteriorated properties with crime and danger. We discourage using the common word “blight” because the term is broadly used to describe entire neighborhoods—including the people who live there.

Instead of centering storytelling around properties, focus on how these vacant properties harm the residents who live near them.

For example: A grandmother walking her grandkids to school may need to walk past a fire-burned house every day—how do you think that makes her feel about her neighborhood? A resident with a good job moves away because they can’t deal with the rat problem from the vacant building next door anymore. A small-business owner might struggle to attract customers when the view from the storefront is an overgrown lot piled with illegally dumped tires. These are the real, everyday consequences of vacancy.

If you’re comfortable sharing, you can also offer any personal connection you have to addressing vacant properties. Community Progress President & CEO Kathleen Guillaume-Delemar regularly shares her story of overcoming trauma growing up in a disinvested community. In interviews, she talks about how her abuser spent his days with other drug dealers in a vacant lot at the end of the block, and how the community eventually came together to push them out and transform that vacant lot into a beautiful children’s playground.

Spotlight solutions.

Once you’ve painted a vivid picture, people usually ask, “So what are you doing about it?” That’s your chance to explain your work in more detail—but leave out the jargon!

You might say:

• Our organization helps put vacant buildings back to use by clearing up ownership issues and connecting them with local developers who want to transform them into affordable homes.
• We work with neighbors and community leaders to take care of the empty lots in the city. We help turn them into pocket parks, gardens, and help manage stormwater.
• We help cities change laws and policies so that vacant properties get out of legal limbo and are easier to return to new uses.

Explaining vacancy to the public is about helping people connect the dots. Vacant and abandoned properties aren’t just empty buildings in the background. They affect people’s safety, health, and opportunities—and they shape how whole neighborhoods feel. And everyone wants the place they live to feel like home.

By using plain language, relatable examples, and specific solutions, you can shift the conversation from boredom, confusion, or fear to curiosity about the possibilities. The more people understand the depth of the challenge, the more likely they are to support solutions and the communities working to make them a reality.